The Rolls Behind the Rolls the English Pipe Rolls and Their Preliminary Documents

Richard Cassidy The Rolls Behind the Rolls The English Pipe Rolls and Their Preliminary Documents The National Archives in London contains a mass of documents from the English exchequer of the thirteenth century, many of which have not yet been studied in any detail.1 These documents, mostly in the form of parchment rolls, can help us to under- stand the procedures of the exchequer. They show a complex system of interlocking written records, intended to minimize fraud and to enable the central government to maintain control over its agents throughout the country. The pipe rolls stood at the apex of this pyramid of parchment. They were still being produced in the eighteenth century, when Thomas Madox, the antiquary and exchequer clerk, wrote: Amongst the Records of the Exchequer the Great Roll of the Pipe must be placed first, by reason of its pre-eminent Dignity. It was and is the most stately Record in the Exchequer, and the great Medium of Charge and Discharge, of Rents, Farms, and Debts due to the Crown. Into it the Accounts of the royal Revenue entered through divers Channels, as Rivers flow into the Ocean.2 These “rivers” flowing into the ocean of the pipe rolls included various sources of royal revenue, each of which produced their own accounts of outstanding debts, or of income and expenditure. Such accounts were checked by the exchequer, and sum- maries were recorded in the pipe rolls. Some of the background material which the exchequer used in this process still survives. These subsidiary rolls have received little attention, but they can show both how the various branches of government operated, and how the exchequer set about its task of collating, checking and summarizing a mass of information. This information grew so voluminous that the exchequer was obliged to try a series of expedients to reduce the amount of documentation produced, in the process generating yet more rolls. This paper will attempt to describe the exchequer’s system of rolls in the thirteenth century; some of the ways in which information about government financial activities was delivered to the exchequer; and the exchequer’s attempts to limit the size of the rolls it produced as part of this process. It is necessary to begin with a brief description of the system of rolls in the thirteenth century, because that century still has no equivalent to R. L. Poole’s classic account of the exchequer in the twelfth century.3 The exchequer’s procedures changed over time, and its activities in the reign of Henry III were no longer adequately described by the Dialogue of the Exchequer, produced in the reign of Henry II. The Dia- 1 All manuscript references are to documents in Kew, The National Archives. 2 Madox 17692, vol. 2, 112. 3 Poole 1912. Open Access. © 2019 Richard Cassidy, published by De Gruy ter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645125-006 148 Richard Cassidy logue provides a unique contemporary account of the audit of accounts as a face-to- face confrontation of sheriff versus exchequer officials. It is not, however, a reliable guide to all the details of the process. It implies that the pipe rolls were written on the spot during the audit process, as the sheriff presented his accounts. This was not necessarily the case at the time, as some parts of the pipe rolls were clearly prepared in advance, leaving gaps where figures could be entered later.4 Ulla Kypta has recently pointed out many other aspects of the twelfth-century pipe rolls which were not ac- curately reflected in the Dialogue, which cannot be read as a manual of office proce- dure.5 Further differences from the process described in the Dialogue emerged later, in the thirteenth century; the audit process, for example, took much longer than the Dialogue would imply. The Red Book of the Exchequer has a table of the number of days assigned for sheriffs to account at the exchequer, ranging from one day for Cornwall and Rutland, up to twelve days for Essex and Hertfordshire. Other accounts might take even longer: keepers of episcopal vacancies could have to stay at the exchequer for several weeks to render their accounts.6 The pipe rolls themselves expanded and became more complex, covering much more than just the sheriffs’ accounts for the counties. Unfortunately, the publication of the continuous annual sequence of pipe rolls has yet to progress beyond the roll for 1224.7 Only a few exchequer rolls dating from the last three-quarters of the thirteenth century have been published.8 It may therefore be helpful to outline the major flows of written information to and from the exchequer in the mid-thirteenth century, beginning with the rolls concerning the collection of cash. The chancery recorded offers of cash, in the form of fines, in its fine rolls; these fines were copied onto the originalia rolls, together with other useful information such as the appointment of officials; the originalia rolls were sent to the exchequer.9 The various courts recorded their decisions in plea rolls, and notes of the amercements im- posed were then made in the estreat rolls, also sent to the exchequer.10 The exchequer sorted this information by county, and produced lists of debts to be collected; these summonses were then sent to the appropriate sheriffs. The debts were also copied into the pipe roll for the year, at the end of each county’s account in the section headed Nova oblata. The sheriffs collected the debts in the counties, issuing wooden tally sticks as receipts. As well as payments from debtors, the sheriffs collected the tra- 4 Dialogus de Scaccario, eds. Amt and Church, 60–61; Hagger 2009, 68–69. 5 Kypta 2018, 201–209. 6 The Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. Hall, vol. 3, 838–839; Howell 1962, 101. 7 The pipe rolls for 1230 and 1242 have also appeared, and the Pipe Roll Society has plans to publish the pipe rolls for 1225, 1226 and 1259. 8 For example: The Pipe Roll for 1295 Surrey Membrane, ed. Mills; Memoranda Rolls 16–17 Henry III, ed. Brown; Receipt and Issue Rolls for the 26th Year of the Reign of King Henry III, ed. Stacey. 9 Dryburgh 2015, 31–37. 10 Meekings 1979, 128–140. The Rolls Behind the Rolls 149 ditional revenues of the counties, such as amercements in the county courts, which made up the county farm. The sheriffs delivered the cash to the treasury, and the amounts paid into the treasury were recorded on the receipt rolls. Payments made at the adventus, when sheriffs came to the exchequer at the beginning of the Michaelmas and Easter terms, were also noted in the memoranda roll.11 Full or partial payment of outstanding debts was duly recorded in the pipe roll. The memoranda roll recorded the dates set for auditing sheriffs’ accounts and listed the actions to be taken on debts in each county. Further rolls were needed to cover the expenditure of cash. The chancery sent writs to the exchequer, instructing it to make payments. These were recorded in two sets of liberate rolls, in the chancery when they were sent and in the exchequer when they were received. When a cash payment was made from the treasury, it was noted in the issue roll. Local officials, such as sheriffs, could also be instructed to pay out cash, for example to buy supplies or to make religious or charitable donations. The exchequer was again informed of these instructions, noted in the liberate roll, so that it could make the appropriate allowance to the local official when he came to account. The official had to produce evidence that the payment had actually been made: tally sticks; the evidence of expert witnesses, particularly for building works; or written itemized accounts of expenditure. Such payments then appeared in the pipe roll, set against the debt which the official was required to deliver. Although the pipe rolls were originally concerned mainly with the accounts of the sheriffs of each county, they expanded to cover much else. Within the county accounts, an increasing number of boroughs dealt directly with the exchequer, rather than having the sheriff as an intermediary. Such boroughs paid their own farm, de- livering cash at the adventus and making payments locally as instructed by writs. In addition to the county accounts, the pipe rolls covered numerous other sources of government finance, in the so-called foreign accounts. These included escheators, the keepers of the exchanges, and administrators of episcopal vacancies. The manors of the royal demesne, which had been managed by the sheriffs until the reforms of the 1230s, had been largely granted away or farmed out, but occasionally returned to direct management.12 When this happened, their custodians had to produce sepa- rate manorial accounts, which also appeared in the pipe rolls. All these accounts required documentary evidence of receipts and expenditure, and some of these records survive, as will appear below. The wardrobe, which administered the finances of the king’s household, also presented its accounts to the exchequer from time to time, but this has been the subject of a thorough recent study by Benjamin Wild.13 The pipe rolls were known by contemporaries as the ‘great rolls’, presumably re- flecting both their size and their significance. Their size is certainly impressive. A pipe 11 Cassidy 2011, 615. 12 Stacey 1987, 73–91. 13 The Wardrobe Accounts of Henry III, ed.

Load more